With the northeast monsoon giving the city a taste of what lies ahead, Chennai Metro Rail officials are taking measures to mitigate the effects of rain on their work across the city.
CMRL employs dewatering mechanisms to ensure that rainwater does not accumulate inside their sites. “We have motors with varying capacities to pump out water from the sites. The dewatering mechanism is not very different for underground and elevated stations – the pumped out water is directed into stormwater drains,” said a CMRL official.
Though workers have been provided with raincoats, when it rains heavily, work is stopped. However, this will not affect the progress and pace of Metro Rail work, he added.
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“This kind of delay is unavoidable, we can only try and make up for it. We will pool in some extra manpower and increase working hours to compensate for it. When the drains clog in our sites, we clear them to ensure water does not accumulate,” said an official.
Late in November last year, The Hindu reported that CMRL had sent a showcause notice to one of its contractors, Gammon India, owing to delays in some of the stations they handle. The contractor had attributed the delay to rains, saying that the speed of their work had come down to a great extent as there was water logging in some of their sites then. But this time, sources at Gammon India said they hadn’t faced any particular problem due to the rains.
There are 19 underground and 13 elevated stations dotting the 45-km stretch covered by Chennai Metro Rail and there are nearly 200 workers on each site during peak hours.
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